the church geek

The text for this sermon is Jeremiah 31: 31-34 and is from Sunday Nov 18.

Do you ever have one of those days where you just want to start over? That proverbial day where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and things just never seem to get on the right track? You spill your cup of coffee on the table or drop the jug of milk on the floor and the rest of your day is down hill from there?

Remember that classic Bill Murray Movie Groundhog Day? The one where Bill plays weather man Phil Connors who is assigned to cover Ground Hog Day ceremonies in Punxsutawney, PA for the fifth year in a row.

Phil begrudgingly goes about serving his duty, reporting the activities of the famous Punxsutawney Phil. He goes to bed that day, only to wake up the next morning and discover that it is February 2nd – Ground Hog Day - all over again.

When he tries to explain to his producer that they are repeating yesterday all over again, she just returns his explanation with a blank stare. It seems he’s the only one repeating that miserable day. And each night he goes to bed, only to wake up to face February 2nd all over again.

At first, Phil gets angrier and angrier as he wakes up each day only to find out that once again it’s February 2nd. Eventually though, he starts to learn a thing or two that he can apply to the next day he relives. Finally, he pieces it all together and wakes up to a brand new day: February 3rd.

Sometimes life feels like you’re stuck in a big old rut and there is no way out of it. Like Phil, it can feel like we’re repeating the same miserable day over and over again. We make the same old mistakes day in and day out. We say what we promised we’d never say again. We do what we hoped we would no longer do.

In our text from today, the people of Judah were in the same sort fix. They had created a huge mess for themselves. As God’s people they were making the same old mistakes over and over again. So now, they were facing impending doom. The growing power of the Babylonians was breathing right down their neck and everyone knew it wouldn’t be long before the walls of Jerusalem would be knocked down.

The threat was certain. Disaster had already in the northern kingdom of Israel. 150 years earlier, the Assyrians had finished off their cousins, destroying their cities, carrying off their people, and replacing them with foreigners from the surrounding nations. The people of Judah, facing their destruction must have been hoping it wasn’t going to happen. Surely they were trying to figure out how they could get out of this mess and they were wishing things weren’t turning out as they were.

It was in the midst of this threat and tumult that the prophet Jeremiah spoke to God’s people. Jeremiah began by painting a vivid picture of how Israel and Judah had gotten into this mess in the first place. Naming things for what they were, Jeremiah described the breach that had taken place between God and God’s people.

He said trouble came because they had walked out of the relationship with God. They were like an unfaithful wife or husband who had cheated and walked out on their spouse. To hammer his point home, he said they were like that rebellious child who was faithless and disobedient to their parent.

The funny thing, though, is that this was not the first time this sort of thing had happened.

Centuries before, the Israelites had been freed from oppression and slavery from the land of Egypt only to grumble and complain that God brought them out of Egypt only to starve them in the desert. While in that desert, Moses ascended Mt. Sinai only to have his brother Aaron and the people he left at the bottom of the mountain create a golden calf to bow down to.

The book of Judges portrays a repeated cycle of failure; a judge would rise up to bail them out and straighten things out. There would be some peace for a while, but the people of Israel would yet again bow down to worship other gods.

Jeremiah and the rest of the prophets not only railed against the people’s repeated unfaithfulness to God. They also decried the way that the people failed to be faithful to one another. They wailed against the countless ways the poor were being oppressed and how the widows and orphans were being ignored.

Put simply, in terms of the ways that Jesus summarized the Torah, they failed in their love for God and they failed in their love for one another.

The Israelites lived the same old sad reality day in and day out. They were stuck in a rut, repeating the same old mistakes. Each day they lived out the exact same failures. They were unable to move on.

It seems that Israelites were unwilling to change. They had a hard time buying into the fact that change would be good for them. Even under the threat of exile, destruction and death, the Israelites couldn’t seem to make the sort of changes they needed to make.

Change is hard and at times even impossible….and that of course doesn’t just go for the Israelites. We all know that change is difficult.

I mean think for a moment about your typical church: How responsive is any particular church to change?

There’s a story about a church that fired its pastor for moving the piano from the left side to the right side of the sanctuary. They hired a new pastor who did the exact same thing, only this one moved the piano so slowly, no one even noticed.

Or how about the old joke:

Question: How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: What you mean you want to change it?!

What about change in your own life? Imagine if your doctor called you up one day and said:

“I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that you’re going to die within a month. The good news is that if you significantly change your lifestyle right now and live it out for the next month and beyond, you’ll live a long and happy life.”

Do you think you could do it? Could you drop everything on a dime and change your life just like that and go in another direction?
Conventional wisdom suggests that people faced with the choice to change or die would be motivated to get it done. Yet studies show it’s just not true.

People who have had heart bypass surgery, usually a life-or-death matter, are directed by their doctors to significantly alter their lifestyle by changing their eating habits, stopping smoking, and exercising. They know if they don’t make these changes they’ll die sooner rather than later. Yet multiple studies show that in just two years after such a major surgery, 90 % of folks have not altered their behavior in any significant way.

Change is just too tough. So if impending and imminent death can’t force us to change, are we completely lost? Are we doomed to ultimate failure?

Well, no. The good news is that change can happen. It is tough, but not impossible. But how is it done?

The answer lies in understanding the nature of change itself. A significant part of the problem is that we usually view change as something we do. We see it as an effort on our part to alter a list of activities or habits.

For instance in the case of heart disease; we gather all sort of information. We find out what the disease is doing to our body. We figure out what a good diet is and gather information about various exercise routines. But then what do we usually do? We try it out for a while only to have our efforts eventually fizzle out.

Another factor - at least in the example of heart disease patients - is that the fear of death is simply not that motivating, in fact it is paralyzing. One doctor who has successfully helped people change says death is too frightening for people to think about - so denial returns - and patients slip back into their old habits.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the various behavior modifications necessary to affect change and instead of being motivated by fear of what will happen to us if we don’t, maybe what it takes to make change is reframing our whole way of thinking.

That’s what one Doctor has done. Instead of trying to motivate patients with the “fear of death,” Dr. Ornish, a professor at UC San Francisco, reframes the issue for them. He works to inspire within them a new vision of the “joy of living.” He convinces them they can feel better; not just live longer.

The doctor encourages them to enjoy the things that make daily life pleasurable like playing on the floor with their grandchild or taking long walks in the evening without the pain of their disease. He says “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.” When they’ve caught a picture of their new life then lasting change happens. It is not just a matter of the mind or having the right information or knowledge; the patient’s emotional, psychological, and spiritual resources must be tapped into.

What this and other change experts have discovered is something that God seems to have known all along. If you really want to change people’s behavior, you need to give them a story, an identity, a new way of seeing things, a positive vision of a new way of life.

In Jeremiah 31, we read how God, through the prophet, reframes the experience of a people notoriously resistant to change. The offer is not to live by another set of rules, but with an entirely new way of being.

Throughout their history, God has offered the Israelites various covenants. The first was the covenant between God and Abraham, based on a promise. The second was the covenant given to Moses at Mt. Sinai based on God’s act of deliverance of the exodus.

But here in Jeremiah is the most extraordinary sort of covenant, based wholly on the act of forgiveness. As one commentator on this passage puts it:

The act of forgiveness…will break into their spirits in a wholly new way. They will know themselves as an extraordinarily loved and forgiven people. That will change them inside and make them respond to Yahweh in a way they never have before.

So, instead of writing another legal prescription or warning them of their impending doom, God reframes the entire picture, saying I will “put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people”

The program of change, says God through the prophet, isn’t going to be posted on the wall or carried around in a box to be thought about. Instead it will be placed within their “hearts.” It will become a part of them, infusing their emotions, their hopes and dreams.

God was not only updating the covenant, he was reframing the relationship, moving them from commandments and rules to a whole new way of being. God was offering an opportunity for change, moving the Israelites from a pattern of failure to a relationship of forgiveness.

There this wonderful little scene in the middle of the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?” The three escaped convicts are walking in the woods when they come across the surreal sight of a group of people dressed in white. As they’re walking, singing that wonderful Allison Krauss song, “Down to the river to pray,” they form a line to be baptized in the waters.

Suddenly one of the three convicts breaks away from his two friends and plunges toward the head of the line to be baptized. As he emerges from the water he tells his friends that the minister told him that all his sins have been washed away. Even, he says, the sin of stealing the pig which is what he’d been convicted of. His friend confronts him saying, “But you said you were innocent of that,” “Well I lied,” he said, “and that’s been washed away too!”

Later on in the movie we see how the behavior and attitude of this convict has changed. In one scene of the movies, he leaves money for an apple pie that his other friend’s steal from a window sill. And so we see a criminal who moves from being a pig stealer and a liar, to a person of honesty and a repairer of justice.

The problem is that many of us - either as individuals or even as churches - are still working with the old way of seeing things. We’re trying to follow the rules and to modify our behavior. We’re gathering all sorts of information, but nothing ever seems to work or to change.

Perhaps its time to embrace a new story - the one God has been calling us toward all along. Maybe its time to realize that our relationship with God is not based on a set of rules or doing what God asks of us.

Instead it’s based on God’s extraordinary act of forgiveness, an act that makes us God’s loved and forgiven people and that gives us the power to start over again. Thanks be to God, Amen.

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